]]>Google and Twitter have rekindled their friendship, according to a new report out from Bloomberg. Twitter will grant access to its tweets to Google, which will start displaying them in search results. Bloomberg says we can expect to see this happen in the first half of 2015.

Previously, Google would occasionally surface tweets but it had to trawl Twitter to pull them itself. Now, Twitter will directly feed the information to Google, automating the process. The tweets will display as soon as they’re posted. It’s similar to a partnership Twitter and Google struck between 2009-2011 that eventually ended after Twitter decided not to renew it.

]]>Twitter left a lot of questions unanswered about its new syndicated ad network, but it looks like Wall Street didn’t mind. The social company’s stock closed up six percent after it announced it would start powering promoted tweets on other sites. The tweets would look a lot like they do in Twitter.

A mockup of a promoted tweet that could appear outside Twitter

It’s sort of a confusing premise, one that led Re/Code to call it a “concept” rather than a “full-blown product.” Would promoted tweets appear on the sidebars of websites? Would they pop up embedded in posts? Would they only show up in widgets that serve up a bunch of tweets? Twitter’s blog post on the news didn’t elaborate further, aside from saying they’d appear on Twitter’s first partners: Flipboard and eventually Yahoo Japan.

Flipboard is an obvious integration, since tweets are already part of the content. Flipping past a promoted tweet as you go through stories would feel natural. “Because Flipboard already integrates organic Tweets into the app, the Promoted Tweet will have the same look and feel that is native to the Flipboard experience,” the Twitter post said.

I was struggling to think of many other examples where there are streams of tweets on other websites. Most media companies embed or show one-off tweets, so a promoted tweet there would look jarring and might keep journalists in particular from embedding tweets. A few years ago, embedded widgets showing latest tweets by certain users were very popular, but I haven’t seen those in awhile. I asked Twitter for more examples of where they imagine these promoted tweets appearing, and I’ll update this if I hear back.

On the surface, Yahoo Japan is a weirder partner choice than Flipboard. Why would Twitter want to work with an Asian arm of a struggling media brand?

Turns out, Yahoo Japan is its own separate entity — the American Yahoo helped found it in conjunction with telecommunications company SoftBank. Yahoo Japan’s popularity has continued to soar even as Yahoo’s has plummeted. And Twitter is hugely popular in Japan as well. It’s an easy way to test the product before courting other companies.

A source familiar with the Twitter’s strategy told me they’re still developing this new promoted tweet strategy and will be releasing more information in the future. The person I spoke with said that we can expect to see promoted tweets both in feeds of tweets from the website, but also as standalone units. “The promoted tweet is a trusted and known unit and it looks and feel really easily digestible,” they said. “You need users to say, ‘This is content I’m ok with having here.'”

That’s key for Twitter’s new external ad strategy to succeed. Given the fact that the company is serving up promoted tweets, not newly designed ads, it has to hope people like that format.

]]>Twitter’s missed tweets product is now live on its iOS app. The feature will expand to Android and web browsers soon. When you’ve been gone from the service for awhile, you’ll be shown the top tweets that appeared during that time. From the most retweeted or most favorited, you’ll get a quick recap on the most important stuff. In the blog post announcing the news, Twitter was careful to say this isn’t the first step to algorithmic curation, “With a few improvements to the home timeline we think we can do a better job of delivering on that promise without compromising the real time nature of Twitter.”

]]>Twitter is reportedly teaming up with Foursquare to power location-based tweets, according to Business Insider. Location features are key to Twitter’s product roadmap, because the company believes such contextual information will make the service more useful for people.

But there’s lots of product changes that would make Twitter more useful to people, particularly new user onboarding tools. So why is Twitter focusing on location-based tweeting, arguably a departure from its core service, now?

It may have to do with new competitor Yik Yak. Yik Yak spread virally through colleges with a product that’s similar to Twitter, except your feed is composed of posts from people near your location. The app has had a stunning rise through the charts, and just raised $62 million in new funding from Sequoia (the main backer of WhatsApp). Although it’s frequently grouped in with the Secrets and Whispers of the world, Yik Yak sees Twitter as its big competitor. With Twitter now taking geolocation so seriously, it appears the feeling is mutual.

BI didn’t get the scoop on what, exactly, the Foursquare-enabled Twitter feature would look like, but sources told the publication we could see it as early as the first quarter of 2015.

We can look to Twitter’s recent Analyst Call for some idea. During that time, Twitter showcased a wide array of preview products — ones it was planning but hadn’t finished building. Location-based tweet organization was one such feature.

In the slides Twitter showed, people could navigate to micro tweet areas, seeing all the tweets coming out of, say, Grand Central Terminal or Olive Garden, Times Square. Yik Yak’s Peek Anywhere tool is similar, although it’s based on pin dropping, as you can see below:

Twitter’s location curated timelines

Screenshots of Yik Yak’s location based post tool

It was hard to tell from the Analyst Call, where a ton of product previews were dumped, how much Twitter was prioritizing this feature. But if it’s working alongside Foursquare to introduce it as early as January – March 2015, it’s clear this matters. It will be one of the biggest changes to Twitter’s product since its inception. And if users adopt it, it could pose significant problems for Yik Yak.

]]>During Twitter’s first ever analyst call Wednesday, the company previewed a range of products it’s developing. CEO Dick Costolo, CFO Anthony Noto, and a handful of product leads gave a rundown of what to expect in the coming months.

They didn’t give a ship date for most of the products — aside from a direct messaging update — so it’s hard to know how close these updates are to being built. Twitter may have been trying to stave off analyst anxiety or prove its product team isn’t in shambles after recent high-profile departures. If it’s the former, the effort paid off. Twitter’s stock was up 7.45 percent at stock closing, with $42.54 per share.

Either way, here’s a breakdown of the most important features.

Location-based Twitter

One of the most interesting projects revealed by Twitter is location-based Twitter curation (see below). The company has experimented with the feature in major metropolitan areas, allowing you to view popular tweets coming from certain geographic locations. This is exactly in the vein of popular app Yik Yak, which has taken off in colleges around the country by allowing location-based discussions. In fact, Twitter’s new city-based list feature looks a lot like one Yik Yak’s founders previewed for me.

Twitter’s location curated timelines

A location-based product has a lot of implications for following breaking news and live event coverage. People will be able to digitally drop into somewhere when they want to see what people are discussing and posting. It will also make it easier to verify photos, videos, and information as coming from actual places (a tool that will please journalists).

While you were away

Twitter also showcased a feature that many would consider a big step in the “algorithmic timeline” direction. It’s called “while you were away,” and just as it sounds, it will show you the most popular, relevant, or interesting tweets that surfaced on Twitter when you were logged off. It will appear at the top of your chronological timeline. The product manager who introduced it, Trevor O’Brien, said, “We’re trying to pick a handful of tweets to start.” The key phrase there is “to start;” Twitter didn’t say whether it will expand this feature to take over your timeline if it’s received well.

Screenshot of Twitter’s “While you were away” feature

Instant timelines

Algorithms! Yes, the company uttered the dreaded A word. But don’t go hate-tweeting up a storm just yet. The company didn’t say anything about introducing an algorithmically curated newsfeed for existing users, but it will use algorithms to build an instantaneous timeline for new users.

To lower the barrier to entry for these people, Twitter needed a way for them to follow a bunch of accounts within minutes of signing up. So it’s introducing an “interest picker” where users will tell the application the topics they care about. It will also integrate address book uploading, so users can be prompted to follow accounts their friends are interested in.

“This is the first of many ways we’ll use data and algorithms to make our onboarding process simpler for users,” product head Christain Oestlien said. Twitter did not clarify whether or not new users would have the option of skipping this process, so they can curate their timeline from the get go, without any help.

Screenshot of Twitter’s interest picker

Direct messaging gets a reboot

The company is finally building out its direct messaging feature. Twitter is one of the last social companies left that hasn’t made messaging a priority in recent months. Although direct messaging has existed for awhile, it’s a challenge to use on Twitter and its 140-character limit makes it a pain for communicating privately. The first feature Twitter will introduce, coming next week, is the ability to send a tweet in a direct message, so you can discuss it with another person. More messaging features will be coming in the next twelve months.

Unbundled apps

Twitter will be building individual mobile apps outside of Twitter. “Vine is first, there will be others,” CEO Dick Costolo said. He didn’t give any hint as to what those apps could look like, but it’s interesting that Twitter is considering an unbundled app strategy ala Facebook.

In-app video capture

Twitter will be introducing a way to capture and share video from within the Twitter application itself. At the moment users can film from Vine and cross-share it to Twitter, or upload videos from their camera roll to Twitter after taking them. But video capture features in Twitter itself might both make it easier to share video in tumultuous news situations like Ferguson and increase the ubiquity of video sharing in general. It’s a reminder to users that video is an option, whenever they hit the create button.

Live event curation

Lastly, Twitter said it has plans to expand its curated World Cup experience to other live events. During the World Cup, Twitter has a curated timeline for users to follow the action. In the future, if Twitter can automate it, that may become a feature for smaller occasions. “Our goal is to take our learnings from the World Cup…and scale it not just to tentpole events like the Oscars…but to the next tens of thousands of events that happen through the year,” O’Brien said.

]]>The Samaritans, the British suicide prevention charity that recently launched a highly controversial Twitter app that scans tweets for signs of severe depression, is not backing down in the face of heavy criticism.

The app, Samaritans Radar, alerts subscribers when people they follow post tweets containing phrases like “help me”, so that the subscriber can then reach out to that person if they agree the tweet is a sign of distress. Many people with experience of mental illness have reacted in horror, suggesting that the tool is a gift for trolls and stalkers, and likely to stop mental illness sufferers from using Twitter to just get stuff off their chest. It doesn’t help that the “depressed” tweeters themselves get no notification of an alert being sent out, nor that they would have to opt out to stop being monitored in this way — a measure that assumes they know the app exists.

In the latest in a series of updates on the matter, Samaritans policy and research chief Joe Ferns said on Tuesday that the charity had taken legal advice and continued to believe that Radar is “compliant with the relevant data protection legislation.”

Ferns wrote that the Samaritans believe they are not, under U.K. law, “the data controller or data processor of the information passing through the app,” and even if they were, “given that vital interests are at stake, exemptions from data protection law are likely to apply” – in other words, they are legally allowed to process that data without the subject’s consent.

I already laid out various people’s analysis of the app in terms of U.K. and EU data protection law in a previous post so I won’t do that again, but I will note that, according to the definitions provided by the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the country’s privacy watchdog, it does very much seem that the Samaritans are playing the role of data controller:

Data controller means … a person who (either alone or jointly or in common with other persons) determines the purposes for which and the manner in which any personal data are, or are to be, processed.

Scanning and analyzing tweets (personal data) based on keywords, then sending out alerts based on that analysis, fits that bill pretty well (Jon Baines has written a deeper analysis on this point.) As for the “vital interests” exemption, that’s an arguable point when so many people see the app as running counter to those interests.

I was keen to find out more about the Samaritans’ legal advice, but a charity spokesperson told me via email:

As we are in discussions with the Information Commissioners Office, and continue to review the concerns raised, we are not able to give more details at this stage. We will respond to further enquiries over the coming days.

So I rang the ICO, a spokesperson for whom told me: “Whether they can release [details] or not is a decision for themselves.” So there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for the Samaritans not to discuss this matter more openly.

Which they really should. If you follow the #SamaritansRadar hashtag on Twitter, a lot of people are upset with the charity’s handling of the disquiet, even Samaritans volunteers:

I'm a Samaritan vol & I'm against #samaritansradar. Its against what I thought we stood for. I'm shocked & saddened we're not listening

A petition against the app has garnered more than 1,000 signatures. Yes, there are arguments to be made in the app’s favor – check out this post by researcher Jonathan Scourfield, who was involved with the project and points out that “there are cases of young people who have taken their lives after repeated tweets stating their suicidal feelings, to which no-one apparently responded.”

But even so, I find it curious that the Samaritans have not at least seen fit to suspend Radar while its legality and ethics are debated and established – if indeed that proves possible. The charity usually does great work, but it’s really hurting its image among many of the people it’s trying to help.

]]>Taking the hands-off approach to harassment isn’t working for Twitter anymore.

Until now, the company has placed far more importance on protecting the free speech of its users than protecting its users from cyber abuse. But its sentiments are shifting after Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda quit the platform in response to two users bullying her about her father’s suicide.

The flood of press about the incident shed light on the issue of how Twitter deals with harassment. The company has faced plenty of criticism in the past for its policies on the matter, but it hasn’t done much to change its system.

It looks like all the company needed was a high profile victim to motivate it. In a statement to The Washington Post regarding Zelda Williams, Twitter confirmed it’s figuring out how to fix its cyberbullying systems to handle such issues:

We will not tolerate abuse of this nature on Twitter…We have suspended a number of accounts related to this issue for violating our rules and we are in the process of evaluating how we can further improve our policies to better handle tragic situations like this one. This includes expanding our policies regarding self-harm and private information, and improving support for family members of deceased users.

As Twitter grows up, it has to be a safe place for its users. As the Zelda Williams case shows, it’s not just unknown individuals (or journalists) suffering such harassment anymore. Williams had a big enough megaphone to encourage Twitter to make a change, or at least make a statement that they promise to make a change.

It’s unfortunate that it took a celebrity with such a megaphone for Twitter to do so. Afterall, there’s been plenty of less-famous people who’ve suffered equally vicious bullying on the site, from British journalist Caroline Criado-Perez to Slate author Amanda Hess. In fact, during the #askcostolo CNBC debacle at the end of July, 30 percent of the questions directed at Twitter CEO Dick Costolo were about user privacy and harassment issues, according to Twitter analytics tool Tweetbinder.

#askcostolo why is reporting spam easy, but reporting death and rape threats hard?

I would guess that until now Twitter hasn’t made solving the harassment problem a priority because it’s a huge can of worms. It doesn’t know how to tread the line between free speech and protection. It doesn’t know how to tackle the monumental challenge of moderating more than 500 million tweets a day, so it’s easiest to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Furthermore, doing something big to fix its approach to harassment goes fundamentally against the values of the company. It has always placed a huge emphasis on freedom of speech and expression, at the detriment of user safety and security. As law professor Jeffrey Rosen wrote in The New Republic, Twitter has “explicitly concluded that it wants to be a platform for democracy rather than civility.”

Without company intervention, users who face harassment have hacked their own solutions, like crowdsourcing twitter “block” lists that mute users who send abusive tweets.

These tools are imperfect, transitory solutions. As the Williams’ case shows, it’s only a matter of time before harassment becomes not just a major publicity snafu for the company, but a reason users choose to leave the platform.

]]>The media is fuming over Twitter’s decision to suspend the account of a British journalist who used the micro-blogging site to toss barbs at NBC’s decision to time-delay its Olympic coverage over the weekend. The episode raises questions about free speech and corporate control of social media platforms. (Updated, Tuesday 9:30am)

For anyone who missed it, the brouhaha began this morning when sports site Deadspin reported that Twitter had cut off Guy Adams, an LA-based reporter for The Independent. Adams has been a standard bearer for the new #nbcfail hashtag and used his account to rattle off a series of British-inflected tirades about NBC’s time delay: “‘Sneak peak’ my arse”; “tosspot”; “Matt Lauer would do well to shut up, wouldn’t he?” and so on.

Adams apparently crossed a line when he published the email address of NBC executive Gary Zenkel and told followers to “Tell him what u think.” NBC complained to Twitter and shortly after the micro-blog site suspended Adams’ account.

Critics have since called attention to the fact that Twitter has partnered with NBC’s parent company to promote the games, and suggested that the companies decided to shut down Adams’ account as an act of reprisal.

In an email message to Adams, Twitter explained the account had been suspended because he had violated terms of service that forbid disclosing private information like a person’s telephone number or private email address. Deadspin and others have noted that gary.zenkel@nbcuni.com is a corporate address.

So who is right? Did Adams overstep a boundary or are Twitter and NBC wrongfully censoring a journalist? Well, from a legal point of view, Twitter is in the clear. The company’s terms of service make it plain that it can boot users off the site anytime and for any reason.

Twitter’s moral position is a lot more shaky. Its reason for tossing Adams is flimsy (the email he printed was not private) and, worse, they simply caused him to disappear altogether. If you search @guyadams on Twitter, the company will suggest users with similar handles but the original Guy Adams has simply vanished in the same way that disgraced communists would vanish from Kremlin photographs.

In the future, Twitter should show who it is barring from the site and explain why. In the meantime, it should give Guy Adams his account back.

Update: The Telegraph reported Tuesday that NBC claims that it was Twitter who informed their social media department about Adams’ tweets and informed them how to file a complaint. Meanwhile, respected social media journalist Danny Sullivan has pointed out that Gary Zenkel’s email address was not widely available. Other are questioning the appropriateness of using Twitter to initiate ‘email bombing.’ As of Tuesday morning, Twitter has remained silent in the face of what appears to be its biggest PR crisis to date.

]]>In a candid ruling, a New York judge said a protester can’t stop prosecutors from searching his Twitter account because he doesn’t own the tweets in the first place.

Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. cited a “widely-believed” but “mistaken” notion about online privacy rights and said that search and seizure protections don’t apply because we “do not have a ‘physical’ home on the Internet.”

The ruling, which grows out of the Occupy Wall Street protests, reinforces a troubling legal trend that declares people have no privacy right in their online communications — even though they spend more and more of their time on services like Twitter and Facebook. Ironically, the judge acknowledged as much:

The reality of today’s world is that social media, whether it be Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ or any other site, is the way people communicate..

The communications in this case were the tweets of Malcolm Harris, who was charged with disorderly conduct after marching on the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge. Tweets, by their nature, are public communications, but a search of his Twitter account would also reveal more private information. As the court explained, “Twitter collects many types of user information, including IP address, physical location, browser type, mobile carrier among other types.”

In his ruling, Judge Sciarrino Jr. compared Twitter and email accounts to bank records. He cited a 1976 case in which a divided Supreme Court said a defendant had no right to stop searches of his bank statements because the records were the property of the bank.

In blunt language, the judge explained:

Here, the defendant has no proprietary interests in the @destructuremal account’s user information and Tweets … Twitter’s license to use the defendant’s Tweets means that the Tweets the defendant posted were not his.

The notification process allows users an opportunity to challenge the searches in court and ensure they are not overly broad. Rulings like that of Judge Sciarrino Jr., however, undermine that ability by saying that users don’t have a right to get involved in the first place — even though it is their data at stake:

The widely believed (though mistaken) notion that any disclosure of a user’s information would first be requested from the user and require approval by the user is understandable, but wrong. While the Fourth Amendment provides protection for our physical homes, we do not have a physical “home” on the Internet. [..] As a user, we may think that storage space to be like a “virtual home,” and with that strong privacy protection similar to our physical homes. However, that “home” is a block of ones and zeroes stored somewhere on someone’s computer. As a consequence, some of our most private information is sent to third parties and held far away on remote network servers.

The judge also used the ruling to show off his fluency with Twitter itself. Referring to the microblog’s convention of using hashtags as keywords, he noted that Harris’s motion to “#quash” the subpoena was “#denied.”

]]>It remains to be seen whether all social networks can be profitable on advertising alone — and crucially what formats will work best alongside people’s communications with each other — but for now we are at least seeing some big growth in the space.

In 2011, Twitter’s advertising revenues grew 233 percent, and LinkedIn’s sales were up 95 percent, and both are set to see more growth in the years ahead.

Meanwhile, just days before an expected IPO, Facebook has solidified its lead in online display advertising not just in social networking, but over all online properties.

According to figures out from eMarketer today, Twitter’s revenue from advertising was a mere $139.5 million in 2011, but that was actually up by 233 percent over 2010. The analysts believe that international growth will further push that number up to $259.9 million this year, a rise of 83 percent.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) actually rounded off 2011 with more ad revenues than Twitter, with $154.6 million in sales. But it will see much more modest growth in the years ahead, with that figure only going up by 46 percent in 2012 to $226 million. At the moment, LinkedIn is proving to have the bigger international profile when it comes to advertising, with some 32 percent of its ad revenues expected to come from outside the U.S. in 2012, versus only 10 percent for Twitter. (Full tables with forecasts at the bottom of this post.)

Today, Twitter has some 300 million users compared to 135 million for LinkedIn, and so some of Twitter’s gain on LinkedIn in ad revenues could be down to that simple fact. User numbers may, too, be the reason why Twitter will widen its lead in ad sales even further in the years ahead. By 2014, eMarketer predicts that Twitter will have annual ad revenues of $540 million compared to $405.6 million for LinkedIn.

But even those 2014 figures are still less than 15 percent of what Facebook makes in advertising at the moment, mostly in the form of display ads.

With revenues of $4.27 billion in 2011, $3.8 billion of that from advertising (eMarketer via WSJ) Facebook is the social network to beat. That’s true today but also in the future, as it only continues to enhance the services it offers to engage users and keep them on the site for longer.

According to figures provided by comScore (NSDQ: SCOR), in the U.S. Facebook has widened its lead in the display-advertising market in 2011. It now has 27.9 percent of that market, compared to 21 percent the year before. That puts Facebook significantly ahead of the next-closest competitor in display, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), which is at 11 percent. The full figures for 2011 and how they compare to 2010:

In UK figures provided also by comScore, the leadership of Facebook is even stronger, with over 30 percent of the market for 2011 in terms of revenues.

With Twitter and LinkedIn, it is too early to tell which social network’s ad formats prove to be the more engaging, and more attractive to media buyers.

For now, it looks like LinkedIn is winning at least in the variety stakes, with ads to match particular user profiles and professions, as well as different areas for placement (Profile Page, Home Page, Inbox, Search Results Page and Groups) and formats. Twitter has, so far, concentrated on promoted tweets as the basis of their advertising. LinkedIn offers advertisers a self-serve platform for its services. Twitter launched its ad platform only in November 2011, and as eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Wiliamson puts it, the “verdict is still out” on whether it will gain traction.